Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Today for my podcast, I read Subprime gadgets, originally published in my Pluralistic blog: I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me on April 11 in Boston with Randall Munroe, on April 12th in Providence, Rhode Island, then onto... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2024/03/31/subprime-gadgets/...

Today for my podcast, I read The majority of censorship is self-censorship, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a breakdown of Ada Palmer’s excellent Reactor essay about the modern and historical context of censorship. I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller,... <a href="https://craphound.co...

Today for my podcast, I read How I Got Scammed, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a story of how the attacker has to get lucky once, while the defender has to never make a single mistake. This is my last podcast before I take off for my next book-tour, for my new novel,... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2024/02/18/how-i-got-scammed/" class="more-link&qu...

Last week, I traveled to Berlin to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture to open the Transmediale festival. I gave the talk to a full house at the Canadian embassy, and the embassy was kind enough to upload their video of the speech. This podcast is a rip of the audio from that Youtube video.... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2024/02/05/my-marshall-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittificati...

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column. “What kind of bubble is AI?” In it, I ask what will be left behind after the AI bubble bursts: You’ve got one week left to back the Kickstarter for my next novel, The Bezzle, the followup to Red Team Blues. I’m preselling... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2024/01/21/what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/&quot...

This week on my podcast, a preview of Wil Wheaton’s reading on the audiobook of The Bezzle, which I’m preselling through a Kickstarter campaign that I hope you’ll consider backing! MP3

This week on my podcast, I read my final Medium column The internet’s original sin, about the failure of trying to stretch copyright to cover every problem on the internet. Copyright is a regulation. It regulates the supply-chain of the entertainment industry. Copyright matters a lot to me, because I’m in the industry. But unless... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/17/the-...

12 years ago, my four-year-old daughter’s nursery school let us know they’d be shutting down for Christmas a day before my wife’s office closed down, so I took the kid into my office in London to do some coloring, play with toys, and, eventually, record a podcast. It was hilarious. In the years since, we’ve... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/10/daddy-dau...

This week on my podcast, I read my Locus Magazine column “Don’t Be Evil,” about the microeconomics and moral injury of enshittification. It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral... <a href="https://craphound.com/articles/2023/12...

This week on my podcast, I read my short story “Moral Hazard,” published last month in MIT Press’s Communications Breakdown, a science fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. “Moral Hazard” is a story about inequality, fintech, and the problems of “solutionism.” I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless... <a href="h...

This week on my podcast, I read the second and final part of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred... <a href="https://craphound.com/lostcause/2023/11/05/the-canadian-miracle-p...

This week on my podcast, I read part one of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986 It’s... <a href="https://craphound.com/lostcause/2023/11/01/the-canadian-mi...

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, “Microincentives and Enshittification” (open access link), about how Google went from being a company whose products were eerily good and whose corporate might was more often on the side of right than wrong, to being a company whose products are locked in a terminal... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/10/23/microin...

This week on my podcast, I present the prologue and first chapter of The Lost Cause, my forthcoming solarpunk novel of Green New Deal world threatened by seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and their white nationalist militia shock-troops. The book comes out on November 14 from Tor/Macmillan (US/Canada) and Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury (UK/Australia/NZ/SA, etc). As with... <a href=&quot...

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best,” about the real risks (and benefits) of web-scraping, and how to formulate policy responses that preserve those benefits while targeting the harms head-on” Scraping when the scrapee... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/20...

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column. “Plausible Sentence Generators,” about my surprising, accidental encounter with a chatbot, and what it says about the future of the bullshit wars. When I came back to the tab a couple minutes later, I found that the site had fed my letter to a... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/...

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet. The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision... <a href="https://cr...

This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at... <a href="https://craphound.com/internetcon/2023/08/01/the-internet-con-...

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be. Tech bosses know the only thing... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-bur...

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics. Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and... <a href="http...

This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists. The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveil­lance, and... <a href=&qu...

This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams. I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have... <a href="https:/...

This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend... <a href="https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/03/...

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app. The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/19/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/&...